The Great Cake Debacle

I ordered a birthday cake for my dear boyfriend (who's birthday was yesterday), from Sucre, which is a lovely shop on Magazine that has gelato, chocolates, pastries, coffee, and wine. They also do specialty cakes. The cake I ordered was a hazelnut cake with salted caramel filling and shiny chocolate icing, decorated with chocolate shavings. I wanted it to look like a particular cake that they regularly carry (that has a different filling inside). However, when I picked the cake up, it was iced with a salted caramel butter cream, then decorated with a few sparse chocolate shavings. It wasn't pretty. In fact it looked uncannily like the cake had a full head of hair.

When I opened the box to look at the cake, the clerk who was helping me immediately realized that this was not the cake I'd ordered and went to get the lady in charge of the cakes. She was really nice, took pictures of the ugly cake so that she could chew out the people who made it, added a lot more chocolate shavings to my cake so that from the outside is looked like a chocolate cake and actually gave me an additional cake that was really pretty.

I am going to a garden party tonight, and so I figured that the new cake would be a perfect hostess gift. It is a chocolate cake with almonds on the sides and chocolate truffles on top. The icing is beautiful, shiny dark chocolate.

I drove home very carefully, but when I checked on the cakes, two of the truffles (which must have been top heavy) had fallen over and messed up the chocolate icing. I was convinced that the cake's beauty was ruined and that my dear boyfriend and I were stuck with two ugly cakes!

When he got home, I told him the whole story and he was appreciative but baffled. He wouldn't have known that the original cake was wrong in the first place. I pointed out to him that the point of getting a fancy cake is not just having it taste great- it also should look professionally made. He did convince me that the pretty cake is still pretty and a good hostess present despite the marred icing- it is a very small area. We then had some of the hazelnut cake and it was delicious!

The rest of his birthday was really fun. We went for a light dinner at Cochon's sWine bar which was really good (highlights were pimento cheese sliders, a duck pastrami sandwich with bechamel sauce, and a good selection of tasty meats, cheeses and rillettes) , then went to see the Marie Antoinette ballet. Afterwards we had a night cap at another wine bar and our friends got the piano player to play happy birthday.